SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: State or federal court?
MATTHEW PETERSEN: I have not.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: Have you ever taken a deposition?
MATTHEW PETERSEN: I was involved in taking depositions.
AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Petersen's withdrawal came after the Judiciary Committee rejected two of President Trump's other nominees this month: Texas lawyer Jeff Mateer, who has called transgender children evidence of "Satan's plan," and blogger Brett Talley, who was rated "unanimously unqualified" for a judicial post by the American Bar Association.
Well, for more, we're joined by Judge Shira Scheindlin. She served 22 years as United States district judge for the Southern District of New York. She was appointed by Bill Clinton and left the bench in April of last year. She's a member of the executive committee of the board of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Her recent piece published in The Guardian is headlined "Trump's new team of judges will radically change American society," and also has a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times.
Judge Scheindlin, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us.
SHIRA SCHEINDLIN: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what is happening now with the federal judiciary.
SHIRA SCHEINDLIN: A lot is happening right now -- and, as you already said, at record speed. You mentioned that 12 circuit judges have been confirmed. The previous high was three, and that was President Obama, got three circuit judges confirmed in his first year. So, we are seeing a rapid effort to pack the courts with what can only be termed very conservative judges and justices.
We have one Supreme Court justice, and everybody pays a lot of attention to that, but the reality is that the lower courts is where the action is. So, on the 13 circuit courts, they write 60,000 opinions. The Supreme Court writes 62. So, you can see that the final word in most cases is at the appellate level. The trial courts write several hundred thousand opinions per year. There are a total of about 179 circuit judges throughout the country, 677 district court judges. And as you know, a Supreme Court vacancy is a very rare event.
So, if those lower courts become filled with very conservative judges, all of whom who have life tenure, all of whom will serve 30 to 40 years, then the impact of these appointments will last for decades. And the judges he's picked are not going to be friendly to abortion rights, gay rights, affirmative action, voting rights -- so many issues that affect so many people on a daily basis. They're anti-regulation. There's just so many subject matters that will change when these folks become the majority on the various appellate and district courts.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you've written that Trump has not only rushed all these appointments, but he's also ceded the selection of the judges to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
SHIRA SCHEINDLIN: That seems true. Those are the go-to sources that he uses to find qualified -- in his view, qualified -- candidates for the federal courts. So when he wants to find people who think as he thinks or who will become judges in the mold that he would like to see, he goes to those sources to find the candidates -- and, obviously, doesn't vet them too well. As you already pointed out, a couple of them have no business on any trial court or any appellate court, because they have no judicial experience whatsoever, no courtroom experience.
AMY GOODMAN: In today's New York Times, Reverend Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, wrote about Trump's nomination of Thomas Alvin Farr, a protege of Senator Jesse Helms, to serve on the U.S. district court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Barber writes about Farr's connections to white supremacist causes and writes, quote, "Mr. Farr's former law partner, Thomas Ellis, was Mr. Helms's top deputy for decades. He also served as a director of the Nazi-inspired, pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and used funding from that organization to create and bankroll a network of interlocking organizations to support Mr. Helms and other political candidates who espoused the notion of a superior white race and opposed civil rights."
Barber went on to write, quote, "African-Americans seeking to have their rights protected under federal law have much to fear if Mr. Farr takes the bench. This is particularly the case in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which covers an area where about half of the state's African-American residents live and is often referred to as its Black Belt."
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